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The constant claim from gun control activists is that “mass shootings don’t happen in any other developed country.” Which is strange, because Mexico is fairly developed and they have mass shootings on a regular basis. I guess only “proper” developed countries count, places like France, Germany and England. Speaking of England, something happened Saturday afternoon that directly contradicts the President’s statements on the matter: there was a mass shooting . . .

From the BBC:

Four men were taken to hospital with bullet wounds to their legs after an incident in Birmingham city centre.

Police said they were called to the Costcutter shop in Great Hampton Row on Saturday afternoon.

Three men remain in hospital for treatment for their injuries, which are not thought to be life-threatening.

According to ShootingTracker, the agitprop propagating site that’s constantly being referenced by mainstream media, any incident in which four or more people are injured and a firearm is involved is considered a “mass shooting” these days. By those standards, this incident in Blighty qualifies as a 100% bona fide mass shooting. QED, the US isn’t the only “developed” country where mass shootings happen. And even some of the strictest gun control laws in the world doesn’t prevent them.

Or would they like to revise their definitions to fit their agenda once again?

53 COMMENTS

  1. Common sense gun safety laws prevent these things from happening. Or not. Bad guys gotta be bad guys.

    And bad politicians gotta be tarred and feathered.

  2. You misunderstand the left. When comparing the US to ROW, they count all US shootings with 4 or more injured. But fpr ROW they only count when 4 or more are dead. That can be hard to track because the UK supposedly only counts a homicide as a murder if the murderer is caught and convicted. And they count multiple homicide incidents as a single murder.

    • Yep. England keeps dirty stats to make their crime rates “low.” In fairness, we have police chiefs here cooking the books to make crime rates appear low, too.

      • Doctored stats and still the highest violent crime rate in Europe?

        I guess Brits aren’t good at cooking books or food.

        • Hey! The food in the UK is far superior to anything you have here (except diners, of course). “Fine Food” in the US is swill compared to some of the local eateries in the UK which are also far less expensive than the overpriced places you have here where the waiters are surly gits who think they deserve 20% just for doing their job.

        • Yeah, the food there is great…because the restaurant industry is controlled by immigrants from the mainland, where they know how to cook.

        • ” . . . overpriced places you have here where the waiters are surly gits who think they deserve 20% just for doing their job. . .”

          Well, it looks like you’re Not From Here so that is kinda understandable. Or maybe it’s because you live in megacityland or, perhaps, Austin. Here in Texas most restaurants, although you have to look for ’em in Austin, treat you like family. I just spent 3 hours sitting on a front porch talking with an old friend. Endless iced-tea refills, killer burgers the size of hubcaps . . . And, yeah, the food server got her 20%. Money well spent for providing that kind of service. You just have to know where to go. Or live in Texas.

      • They are not counting murders that way to cook the books. Under English law you need a murderer to have a murder. Can’t have a murderer without a conviction. However, a corner can declare a death a probable homicide. By this measure the UK has a murder rate somewhere between 1.7 and 2.0 per 100000. The British police are pretty good at closing cases. If Chicago counted murders by the British definition the city murder rate might approach actual UK levels.

        • There’s more than that. 1/5 of crimes reported to the police are dropped with no official report made and 3/4 of investigations are mishandled which leads to a failure to convict. It is estimated UK police detect half the crimes committed. Then you have to consider the policy of “cautions” that allow criminals caught in the act of committing a crime to simply walk away with a warning, including rape, pedophilia, and violent assault. Officers are supposed to record when they issue a caution, but whether or not that actually happens is debated.

          I did some quick research in my response on Quora to the question: How effective are the gun control laws in England: https://www.quora.com/How-effective-are-the-gun-control-laws-in-England/answer/Fred-Lead

        • Fred.

          It easy to cover up the number of robberies, assaults and even rapes. Murder not so much. As Anne Robinson used to say some village is missing it’s idiot. Somebody is going to notice. Sure you can misclassify some murders as suicides (See the Japaneze concept of “family suicide “) but not enough to jack up the number to US levels.

          • It easy to cover up the number of robberies, assaults and even rapes. Murder not so much.

            They aren’t “covering up” the murders, they simply aren’t recording them. Read this report to a select committee of Parliament:

            http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmselect/cmhaff/95/95ap25.htm

            “Since 1967, homicide figures for England and Wales have been adjusted to exclude any cases which do not result in conviction.”

            So if a murder, or any homicide, is unsolved, or unresolved in any matter, it doesn’t get counted. If you look at their raw numbers from their death registry of people that died from things like assault, intentional poisoning, strangulation, non-accidental drowning, guns, explosives, stabbing, being pushed from a high place, run over, and “other specified events in various places,” their murder rate is way higher than their “official” rate published by the Home Office. The numbers don’t add up at all!

            You could look at the UK’s Dept of Justice Coroner’s inquests outcomes but that won’t tell you much. Instead of calling something a homicide or an accident or negligent or whatever, there is a “narrative verdict” describing the cause of death in a narrative manner without putting it in a category. Then it doesn’t get counted. In one year the Home Office listed 657 murders, but there were 4,400 uncategorized violent deaths that did not go into their official murder/homicide rate. In the US the FBI Uniform Crime Report would list and count those. In the UK they don’t!

            If they did, their rate would be 8 times higher than it is! If the UK counted deaths the same way the FBI does, the murder/homicide rate of the UK would be twice what it is in the US!

        • I read that report several years ago. Coroners are still required to render an opinion. Under British law probable homicide is not the same thing as certain homicide. That requires you to actually convict someone of the crime. The Home Office is up front about that. They publish the statitics on probable homicides. That is the apples to apples conparison. The actual murder rate is higher than Canada’s and slightly lower than non ghetto America.

    • Fishy, You are correct about how England covers up its true crime and murder rates. Murder is the most solved crime in America but only about 20% of them result in people going to jail. Assuming that murders are cleared by arrest and conviction the same as they are here in the US then that would indicate only about 1/5th of the actual numbers are reported in England too.

      Also a few years ago I was reading a british newspaper and a police chief admitted that country wide the police there only reported 10 to 50% of the actual crimes to the national level.

    • 25 years ago I was a USAF LEO stationed in Europe, and I saw host nation police agencies cook the books all the time. The US always airs its dirty laundry for all to see, but other countries, they go out of their way to hide anything that embarrasses them. For example, a base I was stationed at was located near a park. For several months, a gang of thugs frequented the park attacking and raping women who happened to walk through the park. It wasn’t on the news. The local police did not warn the public. We only found out about it through unofficial channels.

  3. Just to play devil’s advocate, here’s the response I would expect from someone who still wants to restrict access to firearms:
    1] This might happen occasionally in (insert country here), but not nearly as often as in the U.S.
    2] When these incidents do happen in (insert country here), the number of killed and wounded are less than a high-profile shooting, say at a school or somesuch.
    I’m not saying these are my arguments, but these are the arguments I’d expect to hear if I brought up this incident to my liberal friends.

    • And you are correct–or would be, if the grabbers could be counted on to make something approaching a logical argument. Mostly they would rather lie, ignore facts, apply double standards, etc. tho

    • Whether or not there is any truth to such a claim, ask your liberal friends if spree killers killed more people in the U.S. than foreign governments over the last 100 years. The death toll in the U.S. (regardless of whether or not the spree killer used a firearm) will be on the order of 1,000 whereas the death toll in the world will be on the order of 100 million.

  4. Sort of like how fully vaccinated communities experience outbreaks worldwide, yet we never hear this either. Doesn’t fit the narrative.

  5. Well Blimey isn’t that a football ( soccer ) cleat to the personal soccer balls sack of the antis. England needs more gun laws too. See what happens when Piers goes home, US firearm evil follows him.

  6. Who cares about shooting. The real dangerous people are the (D)s.

    Jerry Brown just signed Bill 1461, the New Motor Voter Act, automatically register people [READ ILLEGAL ALIENS!!!] to vote by giving them a driver’s license.

    IF AMERICA IS YOURS TO GIVE-AWAY, IT IS MINE TO TAKE AWAY FROM YOU.

    Just for perspective Bill 1471, demands micro-stamping. THE ENEMIES OF AMERICA ARE AWFULLY BUSY.

    CA – THIS ONE’S ONE YOU.

    • It’s not like it will turn California blue or anything.

      It just ensures that liberal tax-and-spend handout politics will continue to dominate in the left coast.

    • “Jerry Brown just signed Bill 1461, the New Motor Voter Act, automatically register people [READ ILLEGAL
      ALIENS!!!] to vote by giving them a driver’s license”

      That’s all well and good but if anyone other than a citizen were to vote in a federal election, isn’t that still a federal offense or does the law only pertain to state and local elections?

    • Don’t worry. You have legal Marijuana intoxication, for medical purposes, ya right! And homosexual marriage. Why do you need a gun? You have to two most important things in California.

      • California is an extremely dangerous place. Every time I read a tag on any item at the store it says the item will give me cancer in California. Perhaps it’s just that Californians are so entrenched in the habit of blaming everything beside the actual cause they really do blame cancer on their cotton sheets, but I’ll never get close enough to California to ask.

    • Same Governor just signed nations1st adult mandatory vaccine law. Law applies for first time people working outside of health care industry.

    • With every CA “the sky is falling” story in the news and I think “if all the illegals went home, and their offspring, and the “Guest worker”/”educational visa holders went homel how nice would CA be?” No water shortage, No traffic jams, not carbon/smog/demtard problems. WIN/WIN/WIN/WIN for all.

      • CA has a lot more problems than the illegals; the illegals are just one part, an intentional component, of the attack on what’s left of peoples rights and ability to be independent of the government.

  7. If you click the BBC link in the article, there is another fatal shooting story at the bottom of the page. England has gone full on wild west.

  8. They can’t have a mass shooting, guns are illegal there. Truth is, they have a higher murder rate than the USA, so much for gun control helping a country with a murder rate. Lets learn from their mistake.

  9. WTH? Did anyone read the story? “There were no arrests and no direct appeal for witnesses.”

  10. For some reason I can’t log into the forum here and I wanted to post my response on Quora to the question: How effective are the gun control laws in England: https://www.quora.com/How-effective-are-the-gun-control-laws-in-England/answer/Fred-Lead

    The links won’t auto-link here as they do on Quora so I posted a link to the Quora answer.
    My answer breaks apart the myth that the UK is the safest developed nation by showing how their entire criminal justice system is designed to not report crimes and cook the books, especially when it comes to the homicide numbers and rates.

    • You did a great job, there! I will be referring to that for future projects, and definitely recommend posting it under Gun Facts.

  11. If you want to get real mad then read this BBC gem. Apparently some parents in the USA think like this.

    http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34488006

    It makes me sick that when presented with a sensible, safe and organised family they consider gun owners as crazies. The Truth About Guns should post this article to show what is going on.

    This is an excerpt: ”And please don’t think I’m pro-gun. It’s a plague and a curse”. Jon, Washington DC

  12. ShootingTracker’s actual definition of a mass shooting is any incident in the United States in which four or more people are injured and a firearm is involved. Incidents abroad do not count because when they use a word it means just what they choose it to mean — neither more nor less.

    • Quod erat demonstrandum: Thus it is demonstrated. Ergo: Therefore. The former requires significant evidence to prove an argument beyond dispute, the latter presents a case of cause and effect. Ergo, either would have sufficed in this instance as there was a scant argument presented before the qualifier. But we sceptical folk require a weightier peresentation before accepting it as the word from on high.

  13. We receive British TV programs here in New Zealand, as we are a former British colony, and most of our population emigrated here from Britain in the past two hundred years. There are some comedies made by the Indian and Pakistani communities within Britain, which show some areas are no longer solely British. Birmingham, for instance is mostly now Pakistani. Youth gangs of ethnic Pakistanis have been known to gang rape mainly British young women (though they are probably too drunk to report these crimes) and there is a representative element of criminal activity, some involving weapons. Police do not have the resources to infiltrate these gangs, and listening devices do not help as the Police do not speak Urdu. So there is regular gun crime which does not rise to the level of panic in the streets, but it erupts during times of civil unrest. It is surprising that there is not greater friction, but the ethnic communities have adapted quite well and the people are very industrious. This is the way the world changes, but law enforcement is always many years behind the curve.

  14. ‘diinva (Now in Wisconsin) says:
    October 12, 2015 at 14:58
    “Fred.

    It easy to cover up the number of robberies, assaults and even rapes. Murder not so much. As Anne Robinson used to say some village is missing it’s idiot. Somebody is going to notice. Sure you can misclassify some murders as suicides (See the Japaneze concept of “family suicide “) but not enough to jack up the number to US levels.”

    It is easy to document that it happened, but with 3/4 of investigations dropped due to a lack of evidence or incompetence and no conviction those numbers do not make the official homicide ledger in the UK. Maybe it doesn’t get to the same level as the US, but the claim that the UK is safe using official numbers and then the assertion that the UK “got guns right” is completely wrong. Gun crime still, or unsurprisingly rather, increased 89% over the decade after their gun ban. The cautions point was also made to show for everyday crime the police have no responsibility to even make a report, how safe does that make people feel? If I were comparing the UK and US side-by-side a rigorous study would have to be done to compare gangs in the US and in the UK and delve much deeper into individual crime categories. The problem with that, and the purpose of that post, is to show we can’t trust the UK’s official figures so no comparison can effectively be made without being called hearsay.

    Getting UK sources to admit UK law enforcement and crime numbers are not what they appear to be is an important step. Then you can link the systematic corruption in the UK to similar places with similar results like D.C., Chicago, and so on. Debunking the common claim that the UK “got it right” is pretty important considering how much the UK is brought up.

  15. The comment about Mexico in the post should also mention that Mexico has extremely strict gun control that seems to do no good whatsoever.

  16. 4 gunshot victims you say? VERY slow weekend in Chicago. I’m amazed it is reported at all…

  17. “Four men were taken to hospital with bullet wounds to their legs”..
    Maybe England has passed a law prohibiting one of “shooting to kill”.

  18. Sounds like some of the wackos in the democrat party have moved to the UK. And we thought all of the nuts with mental problems worked in the white house.

  19. I’m sure the Brits feel safe from mass-shootings. Of course, they did have the all-time champ of serial killers, Dr. Shipman as a countryman. It’s okay though — no gun used, just a hypodermic needle.

  20. Guess that would have not happened if they had a 2A..I have the right to protect myself, I guess the people of England don’t, Where was Piers Morgan when all this happened, and if you don’t like it tough $hit. I was USAF military police honorably discharged with full pension. I am eligible for HR 218. I would protect you.
    No double standards put DC politicians on Obamacare and SS.Thanks for your support and vote.Pass the word. mrpresident2016.com

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